10 ms·
Code is run more than read (2023)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- choeger 5mo agoClearly, there is a thing missing here: Regulations. If you have strong regulations on how you can make money, you cannot sustainably have biz antagonize user. So in that case biz just becomes a filter for users that actually are willing (and able) to fund your software. That's a good thing. Obviously, our regulations aren't perfect or even good enough yet. See DRM. See spyware TVs. See "who actually gets to control your device?". But still...
- codemog 5mo agoStupid regulations are why we have an idiotic cookie banner on many websites.
- tmtvl 5mo agoNo, that's malicious compliance. If the owners of those websites would just stop ignoring visitors' right to privacy they wouldn't be showing those banners (yes, I know the website of the EU also has such a banner, lazy devs are lazy).
- jjk166 5mo ago> Regulations. If you have strong regulations on how you can make money, you cannot sustainably have biz antagonize user. If that's what the regulators are optimizing for.
- 3form 5mo agoI like the final conclusion. And sadly I don't feel like anything changed for the better on this topic since 2023. I am afraid that without a major crash or revolution of some sort, user won't matter next to a sufficiently big biz. But time will tell.
- dbalatero 5mo agoI've found the users-first mentality degrading over the years at companies. It's a bit jarring too, since a lot of my early training was pretty user-centric.
- 3form 5mo agoI do have a feeling that the example of bigger players is carefully followed by many of the other companies, kind of as a cult of success. And that example for a long time has been rather lacking.
- pydry 5mo agoThis is definitely true. In growth companies there is way more emphasis these days on investor hype over user centricity. For companies that have a solid competitive moat they have at best gotten lazy about user centricity and at worst actively hostile.
- angarrido 5mo ago[dead]
- alexpotato 5mo agoI've worked at some of the "top tier" finance firms over the years. It is absolutely astounding how much of them run on code that is: - very reliable aka it almost never breaks/fails - written in ways that makes you wonder what series of events led to such awful code For example: - A deployment system that used python to read and respond to raw HTTP requests. If you triggered a deployment, you had to leave the webpage open as the deployment code was in the HTTP serving code - A workflow manager that had <1000 lines of code but commits from 38 different people as the ownership always got passed to whoever the newest, most junior person on the team was - Python code written in Java OOP style where every function call had to be traced up and down through four levels of abstraction I mention this only b/c the "LLMs write shitty code" isn't quite the insult/blocker that people think it is. Humans write TONS of awful but working code too.
- BobbyJo 5mo ago> LLMs write shitty code LLMs regurgitate shitty code. They learned it entirely from people.
- majorbugger 5mo agoWhich is great until you have to make changes to this kind of code, not to mention a massive refactoring.
- arscan 5mo agoIt is completely possible that the path that got them to this point was the optimal path given their goals and knowledge at the time. And wildly enough, maybe it was even the optimal path with perfect knowledge of the future as well.
- esafak 5mo agoThat's the opposite of 'great'. Good code is that which can be refactored.
- JackSlateur 5mo agoI would not call "you must leave the webpage open" a "working code" :) This looks like an example of biobackend: defective IT compensated by humans Your point is very sane, of course, shitty code was not invented now. But was it ever sold as a revolution ? Probably, too !
- jollyllama 5mo agoAnd cars are driven more than worked on, but putting the oil filter inaccessibly in the middle of the engine block is still an unforgiveable sin.
- wiseowise 5mo agoBut if you happen to own a repair shop, you can make a fortune from drivers who don’t know how to do it. Wink.
- Arch-TK 5mo agoRepair shop owners also don't enjoy work which is unnecessarily difficult. Between rebuilding an engine and disassembling a bumper to replace a lightbulb most mechanics would genuinely rather be doing the lengthy but interesting work of rebuilding an engine than the lengthy and fucking boring task of disassembling a bumper to fix a lightbulb. Moreover, even if a mechanic must charge you stupid amounts of labour cost to do a simple repair because it genuinely takes that much time, the customer might not come away with it thinking: "fuck, I bought a dumb car which is expensive to repair", they might instead come away with it thinking: "all these mechanics, quoting ridiculous prices to fix a light bulb, they must all be scammers".
- a4isms 5mo agoBetween rebuilding an engine and disassembling a bumper to replace a lightbulb most mechanics would genuinely rather be doing the lengthy but interesting work of rebuilding an engine than the lengthy and fucking boring task of disassembling a bumper to fix a lightbulb. ChatGPT, write me a 2010-style Hacker News front page essay about how software maintenance is just like automobile maintenance, and why nobody wants low-value maintenance work to be arduous, failure-prone, and boring.
- pertymcpert 5mo agoHere: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69d96c050078819199750da28ebd2526 https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69d96c050078819199750da28ebd2526 I gagged after 2 sentences.
- cineticdaffodil 5mo agoOh noe, noe no.. you want to crowdsource debugging.. describe the error and your expectations, then build software by machine learning while screwing up.
- direwolf20 5mo agobiz > user is capitalism. Removal of that isn't capitalism. Non-removal of that is capitalism.
- cestith 5mo agoRichard Brand says the most important thing to grow a successful business is to put your employees above all else. Being the place where everyone wants to work and cares about their job is the way to get the most loyal customers. Having the most loyal customers is how you make the most money over the long term. Survivorship bias exists, but look at all the Virgin brands and at places like Google. So for a moment let’s posit he’s correct. So, then, the problem would seem not to be capitalism generally. It would be the sort of short-term quarterly goals capitalism we see so often in recent years.
- direwolf20 5mo agoPutting employees first is socialism. Putting owners first is capitalism.
- cestith 5mo agoState ownership of industry is socialism. Richard Brand is every ounce a capitalist. He’s not out there converting his shares into employee shares, let alone into a public ownership. He’s practicing a different kind of capitalism than Enron or Walmart.
- qrbcards 5mo ago[dead]
- psychoslave 5mo agoIt went on the good track, but failed to generalize that ≹ is what apply among all these terms.
- evanjrowley 5mo agoDoes the ">" mean "greater than" or is it meant to symbolize an arrow in a ordered sequence?
- esafak 5mo agoMore important than: "We arrived at a little model that expresses the relative importance of various factors in software development..."
- moralestapia 5mo agoGood question, to my it was "greater than" but now I read it again with the other interpretation ... and it still makes sense? Weird.
- btown 5mo ago> But when you run your code in production, the KISS mantra takes on a new dimension. It’s not just about code anymore; it’s about reducing the moving parts and understanding their failure modes. This sentence, itself, takes on new meaning in the age of agentic coding. "I'm fine with treating this new feature as greenfield even if it reimplements existing code, because the LLM will handle ensuring the new code meets biz and user expectations" is fine in isolation... but it may mean that the code does not benefit from shared patterns for observability, traffic shaping, debugging, and more. And if the agent inlines code that itself had a bug, that later proves to be a root cause, the amount of code that needs to be found and fixed in an outage situation is not only larger but more inscrutable. Using the OOP's terminology, where biz > user > ops > dev is ideal, this is a dev > ops style failure that goes far beyond "runs on my machine" towards a notion of "is only maintainable in isolation." Luckily, we have 1M context windows now! We can choose to say: "Meticulously explore the full codebase for ways we might be able to refactor this prototype to reuse existing functionality, patterns, and services, with an eye towards maintainability by other teams." But that requires discipline, foresight, and clock-time.
- signa11 5mo agoyes, run by machines, read by humans. so ?
- mikemiles 5mo ago[dead]
- tabs_or_spaces 5mo agoOnce I wrote the perfect piece of software. It was so perfect that there was literally no bugs for months. How could this have happened? Well, the code was shipped but no customer was running it in production.
- arealaccount 5mo agoSoftware dev would be so easy without the customers
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- kazinator 5mo agoRunning the code is reading. The machine reads the code and performs it.